Wednesday, March 19, 2008

sproinging

I do not have my Barbie Dream House quite yet, and the landlord won't let me tear up the whole yard, so for now my gardening is largely limited to containers. I don't even have a good place indoors to start seeds--everywhere in the apartment that it is warm and sunny enough for happy sprouty seeds, it is also full of cats, and all the cat-free places are dark and cool.

But I'm trying anyway, because seeds are cheap, and because I am itching to do something, to put seeds in dirt and wait for magic.

And look:

My dill went sproing! I also have pots of parsley and basil. The parsley has one sprout, and the basil nada. The pots are in the stairwell outside the back door of our apartment. They get some afternoon sun, but not a lot, and it gets cool at night. I need a house so that I can take over the sun porch and turn it into a greenhouse. Or I need to be able to afford to shell out for grow lights and a heated platform thingie. It'll be probably two months before I can safely move the pots outdoors.

My dill isn't the only thing going sproing:

Pussy Willows get all the glory for their fuzzy catkins in the spring, but the Paper Birch put on a good show, too, as seen here. Pussy Willow catkins are smoother and softer, like tiny little lucky rabbit's feet, and the birch catkins look more like they exploded out of their shell. As they get older, the birch catkins will get extravagantly long and dangly, and the Pussy Willows will get a little longer, most mostly poofier, and the tips of the fluff will turn green with pollen and they'll be sort of alien-looking. More on this story as it develops.